Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices, #3)

by Cassandra Clare

she saw the palm of her left hand, saw the faint scar of the burn she had given herself the day she had told Will she was engaged to Jem. As it had then, her hand went to the fireplace poker. She lifted it, feeling its weight in her hand. The fire had climbed higher. She saw the world through a golden haze as she raised the poker and brought it down on the clockwork angel. Iron though the poker was, it burst into metallic powder, a cloud of shining filaments that sifted to the floor, dusting the surface of the clockwork angel, which lay, untouched and undamaged, on the ground before her knees. And then the angel began to shift and change. Its wings trembled, and its closed eyelids opened on bits of whitish quartz. From them poured thin beams of whitish light. Like in paintings of the star over Bethlehem, the light rose and rose, radiating spikes of light. Slowly it began to coalesce into a shape—the form of an angel.

It was John Thaddeus Shade who imprisoned me. He caught my soul inside a spell and trapped it within this mechanical body.

“I am sorry,” she whispered. You are not the one to blame. You did not imprison me. Our spirits are bound, it is true, but even as I protected you in the womb, I knew you were blameless. “My guardian angel.”

“When you were an angel,” she said, “what was your name?” My name, said the angel, was Ithuriel.

at the moment, the distance between London and Cadair Idris seemed nothing to the distance across it. He felt a shudder, as of some sort of resistance, as he crossed the room. He saw Tessa hold out her hand, her mouth shaping words—and then she was in his arms, the breath half-knocked out of both of them as they collided with each other. She was up on her toes, her arms around his shoulders, whispering his name: “Will, Will, Will—” He buried his face against her neck, where her thick hair curled; she smelled of smoke and violet water. He clutched her even more tightly as her fingers curled against the back of his collar, and they clung together. For just that moment the grief that had clenched him like an iron fist since Jem’s death seemed to relax and he could breathe.

“Tessa,” he said. “I am alone.” The word “alone” came out broken, as if he could taste the bitterness of loss on his tongue and struggled to speak around it. “Jem?” she said. It was more than a question. Will said nothing; his voice seemed to have fled. He had thought to spirit her from this place before he told her about Jem, had imagined telling her somewhere safe, somewhere where there would be space and time to comfort her. He knew now he had been a fool to think it, to imagine that what he had lost would not be written all over his face. The remaining color drained from her skin; it was like watching a fire flicker and go out. “No,” she whispered.

“Don’t say those things, Tessa. Don’t say them.” “Why not?” “You said I am a good man,” he said. “But I am not that good a man. And I am—I am catastrophically in love with you.” “Will—” “I love you so much, so incredibly much,” he went on, “and when you’re this close to me, I forget who you are. I forget you’re Jem’s. I’d have to be the worst sort of person to think what I’m thinking right now. But I am thinking it.” “I loved Jem,” she said. “I love him still, and he loved me, but I am not anybody’s, Will. My heart is my own. It is beyond you to control it. It has been beyond me to control it.”

“There are so many worse things than death,” he said. “Not to be loved or not to be able to love: that is worse. And to go down fighting as a Shadowhunter should, there is no dishonor in that. An honorable death—I have always wanted that.”

if we go down, we go down together. For, I too, wish an honorable death, like Boadicea.” “Tess—” “I would rather die than be the Magister’s tool. Give me a weapon, Will.” She felt his body shudder against hers. “I can do that for you,” he said at last, subdued. “What was the second thing? That you wanted?” She swallowed. “I want to kiss you one more time before I die.”

Her words were cut off, for he had caught hold of her and pulled her against him, and crushed his lips down against hers. For a split second it was almost painful, sharp with desperation and thinly controlled hunger, and she tasted salt and heat in her mouth and the gasp of his breath. And then he gentled, with a force of restraint she could feel all through her body, and the slide of lips against lips, the interplay of tongue and teeth, altered from pain to pleasure in the sliver of a moment.

She had always thought Will was beautiful, his eyes and lips and face, but she had never particularly thought of his body that way. But the shape of him was lovely, like the planes and angles of Michelangelo’s David. She reached out to touch him, to run her fingers, as soft as spider silk, across the flat hard skin of his stomach. His response was immediate and startling. He sucked in his breath and closed his eyes, his body going very still.

“For this I would have been damned forever. For this I would have given up everything.” She felt the burn behind her eyes, the pressure of tears, and blinked wet eyelashes. “Will …” “Dw i’n dy garu di am byth,” he said. “I love you. Always.” And he moved to cover her body with his own.

She had fallen asleep with her head on his arm, the clockwork angel, still around her throat, resting against his shoulder, just to the left of his collarbone. As she moved away, the clockwork angel slipped free and she saw to her surprise that where it had lain against his skin it had left a mark behind, no bigger than a shilling, in the shape of a pale white star.

“Well,” said a very amused voice. “This is unexpected.” Tessa sat bolt upright, pulling the heavy coverlet around her. Beside her, Will stirred, propping himself up on his elbows, eyelids fluttering open slowly. “What—”

“Here,” the warlock said, and tossed a tied leather sack onto the foot of the bed. “I brought gear. I thought you might be in need of clothing, but I didn’t realize quite how in need.”

As the Silent Brother turned, the second automaton knocked the staff from his hand and seized him, lifting him off his feet, wrapping its metal arms around his body from behind, in the parody of an embrace. The Brother’s hood fell back, and his silvery hair shone out in the dim chamber like starlight. All the air rushed out of Tessa’s lungs in a single instant. The Silent Brother was Jem.

Will was on his knees beside him where he lay on the ground. Will’s face was as white as ashes. “Jem,” he said. There was a stillness around them both, a gap in the battle, an eerie timeless silence. The weight of a thousand things was in Will’s voice: disbelief and amazement, relief and betrayal.

“You’re dead,” Will said. “I felt you die.” And he put his hand over his heart, on his bloodstained shirt, where his parabatai rune was. “Here.” Jem scrabbled for Will’s hand, caught it in his, and pressed the fingers of his blood brother’s hand to the inside of his own wrist. He willed his parabatai to understand. Feel my pulse, the beat of blood under the skin; Silent Brothers have hearts, and they beat.

“It’s a staff.” Jem swung out to knock another automaton sideways. “Made by the Iron Sisters, only for Silent Brothers.” Will lunged forward, slicing his blade cleanly through the neck of another automaton. Its head rolled to the ground, and a mixture of oil and vapor poured from its ragged throat. “Anyone can sharpen a stick.” “It’s a staff,” Jem repeated, and saw Will’s quicksilver smile out of the corner of his eye. Jem wanted to grin back—there was a time he would have grinned back naturally, but something in the change that had been wrought in him put what felt like the distance of years between him and such simple mortal gestures.

“Armaros, bring her to me.” The demon’s hands tightened on her arms; Tessa bit her lip with the pain. As if in sympathy, the clockwork angel at her throat twitched.

She took a deep breath. She did not know if what she was about to do was even possible, or simply madness. As Armaros raised her with his hands, she closed her eyes, reaching out with her mind, reaching into the clockwork angel.

White fire blasted through her veins. She shot upward, her gear ripping and tearing and falling away, light blazing all around her. She was fire. She was a falling star.

You have tried to create life. Life is the province of Heaven. And Heaven does not take kindly to usurpers.

The angel’s fire is leaving her body. Brother Enoch, standing at Charlotte’s side, spoke in his eerie omnidirectional whisper. It will take the time it takes. She will be free of pain when it is gone. “But she will live?” She has survived thus far. The Silent Brother sounded grim. The fire should have killed her. It would have killed any normal human. But she is part Shadowhunter and part demon, and she was protected by the angel whose fire she drew on.

“James,” he had said. “You can find out—what they’re doing to her—if she’ll live—” But Brother Enoch had stepped between them. His name is not James Carstairs, he had said. It is Zachariah now. Will’s look, the way he had lowered his hand. “Let him speak for himself.” But Jem had only turned, turned and walked away from all of them, out of the Institute, Will watching him go in disbelief, and Charlotte had remembered the first time they had ever met: Are you really dying? I am sorry.

“Her clockwork angel,” Charlotte observed. “It has stopped its ticking.” The angel’s presence has left it. Ithuriel is free, and Tessa unprotected, though with the Magister dead, and as a Nephilim herself, she will likely be safe. As long as she does not attempt to transform herself into an angel a second time. It would certainly kill her. “There are other dangers.” We all must face dangers, said Brother Enoch. It was the same cool, unruffled mental voice he had used when he had told her that though Henry would live, he would never walk again.

You know I cannot tell you that. He is no longer your Jem. He is Brother Zachariah now. You must forget him. “Forget him? I cannot forget him,” Charlotte said. “He is not as your other Brothers, Enoch; you know that.” The rituals that make a Silent Brother are our deepest secrets. “I am not asking to know of your rituals,” Charlotte said. “Yet I know that most Silent Brothers sever their ties to their mortal lives before they enter the Brotherhood. But James could not do that. He still has that which tethers him to this world.” She looked down at Tessa, her eyelids fluttering as she breathed harshly. “It is a cord that ties each of them to the other, and unless it is dissolved properly, I fear it may harm them both.”

She paused at the door. “Master William,” she said. Having just settled himself in the armchair beside the bed, Will glanced over at her. “I am sorry I have thought and spoken so ill of you for all these years,” Sophie said. “I understand now that you were only doing what we all try to do. Our best.” Will reached out and placed his hand over Tessa’s left one, where it plucked feverishly at the coverlet. “Thank you,” he said, unable to look at Sophie directly; a moment later he heard the door softly close behind her.

“Tess,” he whispered. “Hell is cold. Do you remember when you told me that? We were in the cellars of the Dark House. Anyone else would have been panicking, but you were as calm as a governess, telling me Hell was covered in ice. If it is the fire of Heaven that takes you from me, what a cruel irony that would be.”

“Come back,” he said. “Come back to me, Tessa. Henry said that perhaps, since you had touched the soul of an angel, that you dream of Heaven now, of fields of angels and flowers of fire. Perhaps you are happy in those dreams. But I ask this out of pure selfishness. Come back to me. For I cannot bear to lose all my heart.” Her head turned slowly toward him, her lips parting as if she were about to speak. He leaned forward, heart leaping. “Jem?” she said. He froze, unmoving, his hand still wrapped about hers.

“Where are you, James? I search for you in the darkness, but I cannot find you. You are my intended; we should be bound by ties that cannot sever. And yet when you were dying, I was not there. I have never said good-bye.” “What darkness? Tessa, where are you?” Will gripped her hand. “Give me a way to find you.” Tessa arched back on the bed suddenly, her hand clamping down on his. “I’m sorry!” she gasped. “Jem—I am so sorry—I have wronged you, wronged you horribly—” “Tessa!” Will bolted to his feet, but Tessa had already collapsed bonelessly onto the mattress, breathing hard. He could not help it. He cried out for Charlotte like a child who had woken from a nightmare,

“Tessa needs Jem,” he said. “I know the Law, I know he cannot come home, but—the Silent Brothers are meant to sever every bond that ties them to the mortal world before they join the Brotherhood. That is also the Law. The bond between Tessa and Jem was not severed. How is she to rejoin the mortal world, then, if she cannot even see Jem one last time?”

“You told me it was impossible,” she whispered. “That you could not become a Silent Brother.” He turned away from her. There was something to his motions now that was different, something of the gliding softness of the Silent Brothers. It was both lovely and chilling. What was he doing? Could he not bear to look at her? “I told you what I believed,”

“I must tell you,” he said. “When I received Charlotte’s demand that I come here, it was against my wishes.” “You did not wish to see me?” “No. I did not want you to look at me as you are looking at me now.” “Jem—” She swallowed,

please believe me, that my soul rejoices to see you again when I thought that I never would. It’s just that …” He released his grip on the metal angel, and she saw the lines of blood on his hand, where the tips of the wings had cut him, scored across the runes on his palm. “I am strange to you. Not human.” “You will always be human to me,” she whispered. “But I cannot quite see my Jem in you now.” He closed his eyes.

I knew what I would lose,” he said. “Once you understood my music. Now you look at me as though you do not know me at all. As though you never loved me.” Tessa slid out from beneath the coverlet and stood. It was a mistake. Her head swam suddenly, her knees buckling. She threw out a hand to catch at one of the posts of the bed, and found herself with a handful of Jem’s parchment robes instead. He had darted toward her with the graceful quiet tread of the Brothers that was like smoke unfurling, and his arms were around her now, holding her up.

“Tessa.” The word came out on a groan, as if she had hit him. There was the faintest trace of color in his cheeks, blood under snow. “Oh, God,” he said, and buried his face in the crook of her neck, where the curve of her shoulder began, his cheek against her hair. His palms were flat against her back, pressing her harder against him. She could feel him trembling.

“There is a process. A series of rituals and procedures. No, I am not quite a Silent Brother yet. But I will be soon.” “So the yin fen did not prevent it.” “Almost. There was—pain when I made the transition. Great pain, that nearly killed me. They did what they could. But I shall never be like other Silent Brothers.” He looked down, his lashes veiling his eyes. “I shall not be—quite as they are. I will be less powerful, for there are some runes, still, that I cannot withstand.”

“Does that mean they will not take your eyes—sew your lips shut?” “I don’t know.” His voice was soft now, almost entirely the voice of the Jem she knew.

This is my choice, Tessa, because it is death otherwise. You know that it is. I do not want to leave you. Even knowing that becoming a Silent Brother could ensure my survival, I fought it as if it were a prison sentence. Silent Brothers cannot marry. They cannot have parabatai. They can live only in the Silent City. They do not laugh. They cannot play music.” “Oh, Jem,” Tessa said. “Perhaps the Silent Brothers cannot play music, but neither can the dead. If this is the only way you can live, then I rejoice in my soul for you, even as my heart sorrows.” “I know you too well to think that you would feel another way.” “And I know you well enough to know that you feel bowed by guilt. But why? You have done nothing wrong.” He bent his head so that his forehead rested on the bedpost. He closed his eyes. “This is why I did not want to come.” “But I am not angry—” “I did not think you would be angry,” Jem burst out, and it was like ice cracking across a frozen waterfall, freeing a torrent. “We were engaged, Tessa. A proposal—an offer of marriage—is a promise. A promise to love and care for someone always. I did not mean to break mine to you. But it was that or die. I wanted to wait, to be married to you and live with you for years, but that wasn’t possible. I was dying too fast. I would have given it up—all of it up—to be married to you for a day. A day that would never have come. You are a reminder—a reminder of everything I am losing. The life I will not have.”

“Jem, I must tell you something.” He looked at her. She could see the black in his eyes, threads of black alongside the silver, beautiful and strange. “It’s about Will. About Will, and me.” “He loves you,” Jem said. “I know he loves you. We spoke of it before he left here.” Though the coldness had not returned to his voice, he sounded suddenly almost unnaturally calm. Tessa was shocked. “I didn’t know you had ever talked of it with each other. Will did not say.” “Nor did you ever tell me of his feelings, though you knew for months. We all have our secrets that we keep because we do not want to hurt the people who love us.” There was a sort of warning in his voice, or was she imagining it?

“Did you love me?” he interrupted. It seemed an odd question, and yet he asked it without implication or hostility, and waited quietly for her answer. She looked at him, and Woolsey’s words came back to her, like the whisper of a prayer. Most people never find one great love in their life. You are lucky enough to have found two. For a moment she put aside her confession. “Yes. I loved you. I love you still. I love Will, too. I cannot explain it. I didn’t know it when I agreed to marry you. I loved you, I still love you, I never loved you less for all that I love him. It sounds mad, but if anyone might ever understand—” “I do,” Jem said. “There is no need to tell me more about yourself and Will. There’s nothing you could have done that would cause me to cease loving either of you. Will is myself, my own soul, and if I am not to have the keeping of your heart, then there is no other I would rather have that honor.

“I do not know how I will manage without you.” “I ask myself the same thing. I do not want to leave you. I cannot leave you. But if I stay, I die here.” “No. You must not stay. You will not stay. Jem. Promise you will go. Go and be a Silent Brother, and live. I would tell you I hated you if I thought you would believe me, if it would make you go. I want you to live. Even if it means I shall never see you again.” “You will see me,” he said quietly, raising his head. “In fact, there is a chance—only a chance, but—” “But what?” He paused—hesitated, and seemed to make his mind up about something. “Nothing. Foolishness.” “Jem.”

“Do you remember when we stood together on Blackfriars Bridge?” he asked softly, and his eyes were like that night had been, all black and silver. “Of course I remember.” “It was the moment I first knew I loved you,” Jem said. “I will make you a promise. Every year, Tessa, on one day, I will meet you on that bridge. I will come from the Silent City and I will meet you, and we will be together, if only for an hour. But you must tell no one.”

She reached up and touched the jade pendant about her throat. “Shall I return this to you?” “No,” he said “I will marry no one else, now. And I shall not take my mother’s bridal gift to the Silent City.” He reached out and touched her face lightly, a brush of skin on skin. “When I am in the darkness, I want to think of it in the light, with you,” he said, and straightened, and turned to walk toward the door. The parchment robes of the Silent Brothers moved around him as he moved, and Tessa watched him, paralyzed, every pulse of her heart beating out the words she could not say: Good-bye.

“Change is not loss, Will. Not always.” Will pushed his hands through his damp hair. “Oh, yes,” he said bitterly. “Perhaps in some other life, beyond this one, when we have passed beyond the river, or turned upon the Wheel, or whatever kind words you want to use to describe leaving this world, I shall find my friend again, my parabatai. But I have lost you now—now, when I need you more than I ever did!” Jem had moved across the room—like a flicker of shadow, the Silent Brother’s grace light upon him—and now stood beside the fire. The firelight illuminated his face, and Will could see that something seemed to shine through him: a sort of light that had not been there before. Jem had always shone, with fierce life and fiercer goodness, but this was something different. The light in Jem seemed to burn now; it was a distant light and a lonely one, like the light of a star. “You don’t need me, Will.”

“Listen to me. I am leaving, but I am living. I will not be gone from you entirely, Will. When you fight now, I will be still by you. When you walk in the world, I will be the light at your side, the ground steady under your feet, the force that drives the sword in your hand. We are bound, beyond the oath. The Marks did not change that. The oath did not change that. It merely gave words to something that existed already.”

“When Jonathan bid farewell to David, he said, ‘Go in peace, for as much as we have sworn, both of us, saying the Lord be between me and thee, forever.’ They did not see each other again, but they did not forget. So it will be with us. When I am Brother Zachariah, when I no longer see the world with my human eyes, I will still be in some part the Jem you knew, and I will see you with the eyes of my heart.” “Wo men shi sheng si ji jiao,” said Will, and he saw Jem’s eyes widen, fractionally, and the spark of amusement inside them. “Go in peace, James Carstairs.” They stayed looking at each other for a long moment, and then Jem drew up his hood, hiding his face in shadow, and turned away. Will closed his eyes. He could not hear Jem go, not anymore; he did not want to know the moment when he left and Will was alone, did not want to know when his first day as a Shadowhunter without a parabatai truly began. And if the place over his heart, where his parabatai rune had been, flared up with a sudden burning pain as the door closed behind Jem, Will told himself it was only a stray ember from the fire.

would you stop being so polite?” He looked at her in amazement. “But wouldn’t you rather—” “I would not rather. I don’t want you to be polite! I want you to be Will! I don’t want you to indicate points of architectural interest to me as if you were a Baedeker guide! I want you to say dreadfully mad, funny things and make up songs and be—” The Will I fell in love with, she almost said. “And be Will,” she finished instead. “Or I shall hit you with my umbrella.” “I am trying to court you,” Will said in exasperation. “Court you properly. That’s what all this has been about. You know that, don’t you?”

“James spoke of you,” said Elias. “After I left China, when I returned to Idris, I asked if he would come and live with me. We had sent him away from Shanghai, considering it unsafe for him there while Yanluo’s minions ran free, still seeking vengeance. But when I asked him if he would come to me in Idris, he said no, he could not. I asked him to reconsider. Told him I was his family, his blood. But he said he could not leave his parabatai, that there were some things more important than blood.” Elias’s light blue eyes were steady. “I have brought you a gift, Will Herondale. Something I intended to give to him, when he was of age, because his father no longer lived to give it to him. But I cannot give it to him now.”